Strategies, tips, how to's and best practices for online video publishers

Online Video Watch published a new post today, One-Fifth of US Watching Online citing a report by Integrated Media Measurement, Inc. (IMMI), “showing that up to 20% of episodic content viewing occurs online, depending on the genre of the content and the amount of time the show has been on the air. In a some cases is higher than DVR viewing of the broadcast content.”

The report looked at 14 shows on two of the major networks in Fall 2007 and Spring 2008 and had very interesting findings on viewer demographics. According to Online Video Watch, “Some of the more striking data shows online viewing is flat out replacing TV, not just catching shows you missed or clips that you wanted to watch again. Another key difference showed that white, affluent, well educated, working women aged 25 to 44 were the dominant viewers of online TV content, compared to the male 18-25 demo that is typically associated with online video.”

Citing numerous references he presents a compelling case saying that,”The television industry is already at the start of a slow, agonizing death spiral. As television viewers have switched off, networks spend less on creating content, switching to reality television and other cheap to make genres, causing even more people to switch off.”

Online video continues to rise and dominate on the web. This video from Reuters cites a report by the research firm Jupiter which finds that the number of Europeans watching online video has doubled since 2006.
In a related story, comScore reported that Americans viewed 12 billion videos online during the month of May, up 45percent from last May. The report said Google ranked highest with, “4.2 billion videos viewed (representing a 35 percent share of all videos viewed), with YouTube.com accounting for more than 98 percent of all videos viewed at the
property.”